Teacher of Year finalist from Memphis

July 9, 2013 — (center) Melissa Collins, a teacher of the year nominee, talks with (left) Ora Fly-Roberson and (right) Annalyn Matthews during a lecture on literacy Collins lead for a group of second-grade teachers at the TN Core Summer Training session held a Kirby High School. Collins has been honored at White House and is an America Achieves fellow. (Kyle Kurlick/Special to The Commercial Appeal)

In four years, John P. Freeman Optional School teacher Melissa Collins has been honored twice in Washington — including once at the White House — for teaching that changes lives.

In an era where the focus is on how quickly teachers can improve test scores, Collins is the the kind of teacher whose students make two years' gains in one year.

The second-grade teacher is one of nine finalists for the Teacher of the Year award, the prestigious prize given by the state Department of Education that will be announced Oct. 2 in Nashville.

If Collins wins, she will be the second Memphis teacher in two years. Before Allyson Chick, a third-grade teacher at Richland Elementary won last year, there had not been a winner from Memphis in 30 years.

Collins has been making news for years. In 2006, she became one of the 3 percent of teachers nationally to achieve National Board Certification, a credential so impressive that the Memphis City Schools paid $10,000 a year to the handful of teachers who achieved it.

"I wanted to make myself into an effective teacher for my students. And it gave me an opportunity to do something I wanted to do for my own professional growth," she said. "And it's difficult."

Once Collins, a 6-3 former basketball player from Whitehaven High School, got a feel for the power of her ambition, her life has been planes, panels and off-the chart parallels.

For instance, 30 percent of teachers who've earned National Board Certification since 2008 also have received the Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching.

Collins was one of those teachers in 2009, her first trip to Washington, and was awarded $10,000. She was back several times last winter, first as a winner in the NEA Foundation's Salute to Excellence in Education Gala, and then through America Achieves, a group of 100 teachers selected nationally to advise on national education policy, to meet U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

This year, she was one of five teachers in the nation to win the Horace Mann Award for Teaching Excellence, which also includes a $10,000 award. Through that recognition, she was one of 35 U.S. teachers selected for an expense-paid trip this summer to Brazil to study international culture and ways to translate it into the classroom.

"If someone had told me all the different things that would happen in my career, I would never believe it, never," said Collins, who also finished her Ph.D. in the last three years. "I became a dreamer and a doer, and shared those experiences with my students."

In the back of her mind, she knows she missed opportunities as a child and young woman because she wasn't exposed to job possibilities beyond the traditional options. She sees herself in the children she teaches.

"When I look at them, I think about the missed opportunities, for me as a child and for them too. My teachers should have done more to make me a lifelong learner, to expose me to careers."

She decided she could help them the most by focusing on math and science. Her students wear lab coats. She calls them "scientist Ayden" or "scientist Clarice" and then stands back again and again to watch how a one-word title changes demeanor.

"I can see them change," she said. "Instead of thinking they might be good at science, I have children tell me, ‘I know I am going to be scientist.' "

Principal Monica Smith visited her math class one day to see a series of Lego cars, attached to pulleys, moving steadily up an incline.

"They had built something. It wasn't the pen-and-paper work you see every day. They were putting their learning to work, using science terms like resistance and friction," Smith said.

"Students were able to ask questions, give good description of what they were learning and why. It was very dynamic."

When Smith sees the scores of incoming third-graders, she knows which ones were in Collins' classroom. Besides their achievement, they tend to score high in conduct.